Religious Fundamentalism and Primitive Projective Processes

In her book on the origins, nature and contemporary global significance of religious fundamentalism, Karen Armstrong cites the example of an early twentieth-century, ultra-Orthodox Jewish spirituality1 vehemently opposed to the creation of the state of Israel. Armstrong suggests that

This rejectionist vision is utterly incomprehensible to Jews who regard the Zionist achievement as wondrous and salvific. This is the dilemma that Jews, Christians and Muslims have all had to face in the twentieth century: between the fundamentalists and those who adopt a more positive attitude to the modern world there is an impassable gulf. Rational arguments are of no avail, because the divergence springs from a deeper and more instinctual level of the mind (Armstrong 2000, pp. 204-205 [my highlighting]).

This paper will try and show that Melanie Klein's depiction of primitive mental processes serves to elucidate both the nature of this ‘impassable gulf’ and the ‘deeper’ levels of psychic functioning from which it originates. By shedding a specifically Kleinian psychoanalytic and object relations light on what appears to both warrant and inform the discourse on fundamentalism, it hopes to show how individual and group formation, and the interaction between them, are profoundly influenced by unconscious processes. Such processes are shown to be characterized by mechanisms of defence against anxieties — mechanisms induced by changes that threaten existing social relationships (Jaques 1955, p. 479).